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Regular readers of this site will know that I’m no fan of Rhythmbox. When I recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop PC, I decided to give Gnome’s default media player a few days to win back my affection. Unfortunately, while Novell’s Banshee project appears to be moving ahead with lots of great new features, Rythmbox still suffers from the issues that I outlined in my now infamous lambasting of it, nearly 8 months ago. To be fair, the pre-installed version of Rythmbox is only 0.12.8 on Ubuntu 10.04 (the same one that I reviewed previously), while the project has forged ahead to version 0.13.2.

Regardless, I prefer to listen to my music with Banshee, and I’m itching to try the latest version. On November 10th, the project released Banshee 1.9.0, and it looks positively excellent. I decided to give it a go, and downloaded the source tarball from the project’s website. Following are the steps that were necessary to install it:

If you want to play music encoded in non-free formats like mp3, you’ll also need a few restricted GStreamer libraries like gstreamer-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-bad-multiverse, gstreamer-plugins-ugly, and gstreamer-plugins-ugly-multiverse.

Since I don’t have an iPod or similar Apple device, I’ve configured my installation to disable Apple device support. If you have an iPod, you can lose the –disable-apple-device and –disable-ipod flags after the configure command, but you’ll also need to add a couple of extra libraries to your system. To compile and install Banshee, navigate to the folder where you unzipped the tarball, and type the following in your terminal: